A Heavily Qualified Greatness

Early in 1945, Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King chatted with Grant Dexter, Ottawa correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, about the conscription crisis that nearly had brought down his government the previous autumn. The conversation turned to Naval Minister Angus L. Macdonald, former premier of Nova Scotia and King’s chief antagonist during the Cabinet crisis. King recorded in his diary: “Dexter told me that he did not think Macdonald should be in the administration anyway.” King then claimed that Dexter reported that the Nova Scotia Cabinet told Macdonald he would be not welcomed back as premier.1 Rumours of Macdonald’s political death, however, were exaggerated and came from King, not Dexter. In a letter to his editor, Dexter indicated that King was the source of this false news: “Angus was another of the Judases … Angus had tried to quit … and resume the premiership of Nova Scotia. But did I know what the Nova Scotia cabinet had told him? I didn’t and he...